Overview

"The Worst Hard Time is an epic story of blind hope and endurance almost beyond belief; it is also, as Tim Egan has told it, a riveting tale of bumptious charlatans, conmen, and tricksters, environmental arrogance and hubris, political chicanery, and a ruinous ignorance of nature's ways. Egan has reached across the generations and brought us the people who played out the drama in this devastated land, and uses their voices to tell the story as well as it could ever be told."—Marq de Villiers, author of Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious ...

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Overview

"The Worst Hard Time is an epic story of blind hope and endurance almost beyond belief; it is also, as Tim Egan has told it, a riveting tale of bumptious charlatans, conmen, and tricksters, environmental arrogance and hubris, political chicanery, and a ruinous ignorance of nature's ways. Egan has reached across the generations and brought us the people who played out the drama in this devastated land, and uses their voices to tell the story as well as it could ever be told."—Marq de Villiers, author of Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived—those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave—Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression.

As only great history can, Egan's book captures the very voice of the times: its grit, pathos, and abiding courage. Combining the human drama of Isaac's Storm with the sweep of The American People in the Great Depression, The Worst Hard Time is a lasting and important work of American history.

Timothy Egan is a national enterprise reporter for the New York Times. He is the author of four books and the recipient of several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

“As one who, as a young reporter, survived and reported on the great Dust Bowl disaster, I recommend this book as a dramatic, exciting, and accurate account of that incredible and deadly phenomenon. This is can’t-put-it-down history.”—Walter Cronkite

"The Worst Hard Time is wonderful: ribbed like surf, and battering us with a national epic that ranks second only to the Revolution and the Civil War. Egan knows this and convincingly claims recognition for his subject—as we as a country finally accomplished, first with Lewis and Clark, and then for 'the greatest generation,' many of whose members of course were also survivors of the hardships of the Great Depression. This is a banner, heartfelt but informative book, full of energy, research, and compassion."—Edward Hoagland, author of Compass Points: How I Lived

"Here's a terrific true story—who could put it down? Egan humanizes Dust Bowl history by telling the vivid stories of the families who stayed behind. One loves the people and admires Egan's vigor and sympathy."—Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"The American West got lucky when Tim Egan focused his acute powers of observation on its past and present. Egan's remarkable combination of clear analysis and warm empathy anchors his portrait of the women and men who held on to their places—and held on to their souls—through the nearly unimaginable miseries of the Dust Bowl. This book provides the finest mental exercise for people wanting to deepen, broaden, and strengthen their thinking about the relationship of human beings to this earth."—Patricia N. Limerick, author of The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West

What People Are Saying

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Wendy Smith

Timothy Egan's searing history of the economic and ecological collapse of the southern Great Plains during the 1930s is an epic cautionary tale. Intertwining the stories of roughly a dozen individuals and families with a grim overview of the region-wide disaster, Egan's fluent narrative chronicles the terrifying consequences of a reckless hubris that in a few decades stripped the earth of prairie grass that for centuries had protected it from erosion. The American people and their government collaborated in transforming a sea of waving, waist-high bluestem -- described by William Clark on his expedition west with Meriwether Lewis in 1804 as "one of the most pleasing prospects I ever beheld" -- into a blasted landscape of abandoned farms surrounded by four-foot drifts of dust, scattered with dead farm animals and useless equipment.
— The Washington Post

The New Yorker

On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in “black blizzards,” which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan’s portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the “exodusters” who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of “dust pneumonia,” and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children.

David Laskin

Mr. Egan makes this iconic material fresh by focusing on the plight of a handful of families from the hardest-hit bottom of the Dust Bowl, the western edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle known as No Man's Land; Dallam County due south in the Texas Panhandle; and Baca County in southeastern Colorado.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster-the Depression-and natural disaster-eight years of drought-resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan's interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of "dust pneumonia" when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds. (Dec. 14) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

What happened when dust clouds settled over the Plains during the Depression? A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times revisits the little-told story. An in-house favorite that's attracting huge attention. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Grim, riveting account by New York Times reporter Egan makes clear that, although hurricanes and floods have grabbed recent headlines, America's worst assault from Mother Nature came in the form of ten long years of drought and dust. The "dust bowl" of the 1930s covered 100 million acres spread over five states: Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska and Colorado. From 1930 to 1935, nearly a million people left their farms, littered with animal corpses and stunted crops. Schools closed. Towns simply disappeared. Thousands died from "dust pneumonia," a new condition born of swallowing and inhaling the swirling topsoil. The author personalizes this tragedy by focusing on a handful of hardy settlers who came to America's heartland with high hopes and boundless energy, then watched with growing despair as the earth turned against them. In truth, the dust bowl was largely a human creation. The great southern plains, once covered with native grasses that fed the buffalo and held the soil in place, were essentially stripped bare in the 1920s by wheat-farmers eager to cash in on cheap land and high grain prices. The newly invented tractor made the job easier, and unusually wet weather in the late '20s made farming on the arid plains seem feasible. But then the Depression hit, wheat prices crashed and once-bountiful farms went fallow, abandoned to the deepening drought and ever-blowing winds that literally sent the soil skyward. In the midst of disaster, Egan finds heroes. Among them is country physician Doc Dawson, who opened a sanitarium for dust pneumonia victims, lost all his money farming and spent his last, penniless years running a soup kitchen. Stark and powerful, a gripping if depressing readand a timely reminder that a Nature abused can exact a terrible retribution.

TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and the author of six books, most recently The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America , a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Washington State Book Award. His previous books include The Worst Hard Time , which won a National Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He is an online op-ed columnist for the New York Times , writing his "Opinionator" feature once a week.He is a third-generation Westerner and lives in Seattle.

Read an Excerpt

1 The Wanderer

They had been on the road for six days, a clan of five bouncing along in a
tired wagon, when Bam White woke to some bad news. One of his horses
was dead. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a flat tire, except this
was the winter of 1926. The Whites had no money. They were moving from
the high desert chill of Las Animas, Colorado, to Littlefield, Texas, south of
Amarillo, to start anew. Bam White was a ranch hand, a lover of horses and
empty skies, at a time when the cowboy was becoming a museum piece in
Texas and an icon in Hollywood. Within a year, Charles Lindbergh would
cross the ocean in his monoplane, and a white man in blackface would
speak from the screen of a motion picture show. The great ranches had been
fenced, platted, subdivided, upturned, and were going out to city builders, oil
drillers, and sodbusters. The least-populated part of Texas was open for
business and riding high in the Roaring Twenties. Overnight, new towns were
rising, bustling with banks, opera houses, electric streetlights, and
restaurants serving seafood sent by train from Galveston.With his handlebar
mustache, bowlegs, and raisin-skinned face, Bam White was a man high-
centered in the wrong century. The plan was to get to Littlefield, where the
winters were not as bad as Colorado, and see if one of the new fancy-
pantsers might need a ranch hand with a quick mind. Word was, a family
could always pick cotton as well.

Now they were stuck in No Man's Land, a long strip of geographic
afterthought in the far western end of the Oklahoma Panhandle, just a sneeze
from Texas. After sunrise,Bam White had a talk with his remaining horses.
He checked their hooves, which were worn and uneven, and looked into their
eyes, trying to find a measure of his animals. They felt bony to the touch,
emaciated by the march south and dwindling rations of feed. The family was
not yet halfway into their exodus. Ahead were 209 miles of road over the
high, dry roof of Texas, across the Canadian river, bypassing dozens of
budding Panhandle hamlets: Wildorado, Lazbuddie, Flagg, Earth, Circle,
Muleshoe, Progress, Circle Back.
If you all can give me another two or three days, White told his
horses, we'll rest you good. Get me to Amarillo, at least.
Bam's wife, Lizzie, hated the feel of No Man's Land. The chill,
hurried along by the wind, made it impossible to stay warm. The land was so
threadbare. It was here that the Great Plains tilted, barely susceptible to
most eyes, rising to nearly a mile above sea level at the western edge. The
family considered dumping the organ, their prized possession. They could
sell it in Boise City and make just enough to pick up another horse. They
asked around: ten dollars was the going rate for an heirloom organ — not
enough to buy a horse. Anyway, Bam White could not bring himself to give it
up. Some of the best memories, through the hardest of years, came with
music pumped from that box. They would push on to Texas, twenty miles
away, moving a lot slower. After burying their dead horse, they headed south.
Through No Man's Land, the family wheeled past fields that had
just been turned, the grass upside down. People in sputtering cars roared by,
honking, hooting at the cowboy family in the horse-drawn wagon, churning up
dust in their faces. The children kept asking if they were getting any closer to
Texas and if it would look different from this long strip of Oklahoma. They
seldom saw a tree in Cimarron County. There wasn't even grass for the horse
team; the sod that hadn't been turned was frozen and brown. Windmills
broke the plain, next to dugouts and sod houses and still-forming villages.
Resting for a long spell at midday, the children played around a buffalo
wallow, the ground mashed. Cimarron is a Mexican hybrid word, descended
from the Apache who spent many nights in these same buffalo wallows. It
means "wanderer."

A few miles to the southeast, archaeologists were just starting to sort
through a lost village, a place where natives, seven hundred years earlier,
built a small urban complex near the Canadian River, the only reliable running
water in the region. People had lived there for nearly two centuries and left
only a few cryptic clues as to how they survived. When Francisco Vásquez
de Coronado marched through the High Plains in 1541, trailing cattle,
soldiers, and priests in pursuit of precious metals, he found only a handful of
villages along the Arkansas River, the homes made of intertwined grass, and
certainly no cities of gold as he was expecting. His entrada was a bust.
Indians on foot passed through, following bison. Some of Bam White's
distant forefathers — the Querechos, ancestors of the Apache — may have
been among them. The Spanish brought horses, which had the same effect
on the Plains Indian economy as railroads did on Anglo villages in the
Midwest. The tribes grew bigger and more powerful, and were able to travel
vast distances to hunt and trade. For most of the 1700s, the Apache
dominated the Panhandle. Then came the Comanche, the Lords of the
Plains. They migrated out of eastern Wyoming, Shoshone people who had
lived in the upper Platte River drainage. With horses, the Comanche moved
south, hunting and raiding over a huge swath of the southern plains, parts of
present-day Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. At their
peak in the mid-1700s, they numbered about twenty thousand. To the few
whites who saw them in the days before homesteading, the Comanche
looked like they sprang fully formed from the prairie grass.
"They are the most extraordinary horsemen that I have seen yet in
all my travels," said the artist George Catlin, who accompanied the cavalry on
a reconnaissance mission to the southern plains in 1834.
The Comanche were polygamous, which pleased many a fur
trader adopted into the tribe. Naked, a Comanche woman was a mural unto
herself, with a range of narrative tattoos all over her body. From afar, the
Indians communicated with hand signals, part of a sign language developed
to get around the wind's theft of their shouts. The Comanche bred horses and
mules — the most reliable currency of the 1800s — and traded them with
California-bound gold-seekers and Santa Fe–bound merchants. In between,
they fought Texans. The Comanche hated Texans more than any other group
of people.
Starting around 1840, the Texas Rangers were organized by the
Republic of Texas to go after the Indians. A mounted Comanche was the
most effective warrior of the plains. The Comanche were difficult targets but
even better on offense. Years of hunting bison from horses at full speed gave
them skills that made for an initial advantage over the Rangers. Once
engaged in battle, they charged with a great, rhythmic whoop — like a
football cheer. After a raid and some rest, they would charge again, this time
wearing their stolen booty, even women's dresses and bonnets. They were
proud after killing Texans.
"They made sorrow come into our camps, and we went out like
buffalo bulls when the cows are attacked," said Comanche leader Ten Bears
in 1867. "When we found them we killed them, and their scalps hang in our
lodges. The white women cried, and our women laughed. The Comanches
are not weak and blind like the pups of a dog when seven sleeps old."
The Comanche buried their dead soldiers on a hill, if they could
find one, and then killed the warriors' horses as well. Bison gave them just
about everything they needed: clothes, shelter, tools, and of course a protein
source that could be dried, smoked, and stewed. Some tepees required
twenty bison skins, stretched and stitched together, and weighed 250
pounds, which was light enough to be portable. The animal stomachs were
dried and used as food containers or water holders. Even tendons were put to
good use, as bowstrings. To supplement the diet, there were wild plums,
grapes, and currants growing in spring-fed creases of the .atland, and
antelope, sage grouse, wild turkeys, and prairie chickens, though many
Comanche thought it was unclean to eat a bird.
The tribe had an agreement signed by the president of the United
States and ratified by Congress, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, which
promised the Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, and other tribes hunting
rights to much of the Great American Desert, the area south of the Arkansas
River. At the time, there was no more disparaged piece of ground in the coast-
to-coast vision of manifest destiny. The nesters and sodbusters pouring into
the post–Civil War West could have the wetter parts of the plains, east of the
one-hundredth meridian and beyond the Texas Caprock Escarpment. To the
Indians would go the land that nobody wanted: the arid grasslands in the
west. Early on, Comanchero traders called the heart of this area "el Llano
Estacado" — the Staked Plains. It got its name because it was so flat and
featureless that people drove stakes into the ground to provide guidance;
otherwise, a person could get lost in the eternity of flat. The Staked Plains
were reserved for the natives who hunted bison.
At the treaty signing,Ten Bears tried to explain why Indians could
love the High Plains.
"I was born upon the prairie where the wind blew free, and there
was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no
enclosures, and where everything drew free breath. I want to die there, and
not within walls . . . The white man has taken the country we loved and we
only wish to wander on the prairie until we die."
Within a few years of the signing, Anglo hunters invaded the treaty
land. They killed bison by the millions, stockpiling hides and horns for a
lucrative trade back east. Seven million pounds of bison tongues were
shipped out of Dodge City, Kansas, in a single two-year period, 1872–1873, a
time when one government agent estimated the killing at twenty-five million.
Bones, bleaching in the sun in great piles at railroad terminals, were used for
fertilizer, selling for up to ten dollars a ton. Among the gluttons for killing was
a professional buffalo hunter named Tom Nixon, who said he had once killed
120 animals in forty minutes.
Texans ignored the Medicine Lodge Treaty outright, saying Texas
land belonged to Texans, dating to the days of the Republic, and could not
be offered up as part of the American public domain. With the bison
diminishing, the Indians went after Anglo stock herds. Led by Quanah Parker
and other leaders, the Comanche also attacked the trading post at Adobe
Walls, just north of the Canadian River. Parker was regal-looking and
charismatic, with soft features that made him appear almost feminine. His
first name meant Sweet Smell, which is believed to have come from his
mother, a Texan kidnapped at age nine and raised as a Comanche. She
married into the tribe and raised three children, including Sweet Smell. After
Cynthia Parker had lived twenty-four years as an Indian, the Texas Rangers
kidnapped her back and killed her husband, Chief Peta Nocona. She begged
to be returned to the Indians, but the Rangers would not let her go home.
The Red River War of 1874–1875 broke the Comanche. In one
battle, in Palo Duro Canyon, six Army columns descended on an Indian
encampment, catching them by surprise. The natives fled. The Army
slaughtered 1,048 horses, leaving the Lords of the Plains without their
mounts for the remainder of the war. On foot and starving, they were no
match for General Philip Sheridan and his industrial-age weaponry. The
natives were sent to various camps in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, and
some of their leaders were imprisoned in Florida. In his later years, Sweet
Smell married seven women and built a large house. He founded a native
religion based on vision quests through the hallucinogens peyote and
mescal, a practice the Supreme Court ultimately upheld as a protected form
of worship. The last bison were killed within five years after the Comanche
Nation was routed and moved off the Llano Estacado. Just a few years
earlier, there had been bison herds that covered fifty square miles. Bison
were the Indians' commissary, and the remnants of the great southern herd
had been run off the ground, every one of them, as a way to ensure that no
Indian would ever wander the Texas Panhandle.
"For the sake of a lasting peace," General Sheridan told the Texas
Legislature in 1875, the Anglos should "kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes
are exterminated. Then your prairie can be covered with speckled cattle and
the festive cowboy . . . forerunner of an advanced civilization."
The animals left behind sun-crisped turds, which the nesters used
to heat their dugouts and soddies, until they too ran out.
Empty of bison and Indians, the prairie was a lonely place; it had
taken barely ten years to eliminate them. In victory, the American
government was not sure what to do with the land.
"The High Plains continues to be the most alluring body of
unoccupied land in the United States, and will remain such until the best
means of their utilization have been worked out," the United States
Geological Survey wrote in a report at the dawn of the twentieth century.

At the Texas border, the White family crossed into the XIT ranch — or rather,
what was left of it. Virtually all his life Bam White had heard stories of the
Eden of Texas, the fabled land of waist-high bluestem, of short, resilient
buffalo turf, and the nutrient-rich grama, part of what Coronado had called "an
immensity of grass." Horizon to horizon, buffalo heaven, and a cattleman's
dream, the XIT had been part of the New World's magical endowment —
grasslands covering 21 percent of the United States and Canada, the largest
single ecosystem on the continent outside the boreal forest. In Texas alone,
grasslands covered two thirds of the state, with more than 470 native
species. Virtually all of the Panhandle, nearly twenty million acres, was
grass. In the spring, the carpet flowered amid the green, and as wind blew, it
looked like music on the ground. To see a piece of it in 1926, even in winter
dormancy, could delight a tomorrow man like Bam White, who loved sky and
earth in endless projection.
The temperature warmed just before dusk, and the sky boiled up,
thunderheads coming out of the east. It was too early in the year yet for
clouds to be throwing down lightning and hail, but it happened enough that
people took precautions when warning signs appeared overhead. Bam fretted
about his horses. They looked sad-eyed and road-worn. Like most cowboys
in the High Plains, he preferred darker horses, chocolate-colored or leathery
brown, on a belief that they were less likely to attract lightning. One of his
horses was lighter, not quite beige, just light enough to bring a thunderbolt
down on it. Bam had never actually seen a light-haired horse combust at the
touch of lightning, but he had heard plenty of stories. A friend of his had seen
a cow struck dead by a sky-spark. Bam looked around: there were no rock
overhangs or little arroyos such as they had passed through up north.Well,
hell — what did those XIT cowboys used to do? If those boys could get
through a thunder-boomer without shelter, Bam White could do the same.
Everybody in Texas had a story about the XIT. It was the ranch
that built the state capitol, the granddaddy of them all. Fifteen years after the
end of the Civil War, Texas wanted the biggest statehouse in the union, a
palace of polished red granite. To pay for the new stone showpiece, the state
offered up three million acres in the distant Panhandle to anybody willing to
construct the building. After the tribes were routed, Charles Goodnight had
moved a herd of 1,600 cattle down from Colorado to Palo Duro Canyon. The
grass then was free; it attracted other nomadic Anglo beef-drivers and
speculators from two continents. In 1882, a company out of Chicago
organized the Capitol Syndicate, and this group of investors took title to three
million acres in return for agreeing to build the capitol. It would cost about
$3.7 million, which meant the land went for $1.23 an acre. The syndicate
drew some big British investors into the deal, among them the Earl of
Aberdeen and several members of Parliament. By then, the Great Plains
cattle market was the talk of many a Tory cocktail hour. Books such as How
to Get Rich on the Plains explained how any investor could double his money
in five years.
The ranch land was empty. No people. No bison. No roads. No
farms. Just grass — three million acres of it.
"Those salubrious seasons at the end of the Eighties made that
country appear a paradise," wrote one early rancher, Wesley L. Hockett.
At dusk, when the sky burned pink against the expanse of sod, a
cowboy could be moved to tears, it was so pretty. Much of the XIT was in the
heart of the Llano Estacado, where the Comanche had roamed. And like the
Comanche, the cowboys developed their own sign language to communicate
over distances. The syndicate stocked the grassland with cattle, erected
windmills in order to pump water up for the animals, and fenced it. Barbed
wire was invented in 1874, and by the early 1880s ranchers were stringing it
across the plains, closing off the free grass. In 1887, there were 150,000
head of cattle on the XIT ranch and 781 miles of fence. It was soon the
biggest ranch in the world under fence.
The XIT was lord of the Panhandle. Not just the landowner, but
also the law. They formed vigilante posses to chase down people who
encroached on the ranch or stole cattle, and spread poison to kill wolves and
other animals with a taste for XIT calves. When railroad feeder lines came to
the ranch, the cattle shipping points were made into towns, which brought
merchants, ministers, and other hustlers of body and soul. It was a good life
for a cowboy, earning about thirty dollars a month fixing fences, riding herd,
eating chow at sunset. A black cowboy, or Mexican, had more trouble. A
man everybody called Nigger Jim Perry was the lone black cow puncher on
the XIT.
"If it weren't for this old black face of mine," said Perry, "I'd be
foreman."
The XIT prohibited gambling, drinking of alcohol, and shooting
anything without permission. Outside the ranch borders, little rail towns
sprang up with a different set of laws. One of those was Dalhart, which was
born in 1901 at the intersection of two rail lines, one going north to Denver,
the other east to Liberal, Kansas. In Dalhart, an XIT cowboy could get a
drink, lose a month's salary in a card game, and get laid at a shack known
simply as the Cathouse.
But even with the finest grass in the world, with 325 windmills
sucking water up from the vast underground aquifer, with the elimination of
predators, with several thousand miles of barbed wire, and with martial-law
control over rustlers, the biggest ranch in Texas had trouble making a profit.
The open range, on the neighboring plains states, was stocked with far too
many cattle, causing prices to crash. The weather might display seven
different moods in a year, and six of them were life-threatening. Droughts,
blizzards, grass fires, hailstorms, flash floods, and tornadoes tormented the
XIT. A few good years, with good prices, would be followed by too many
horrid years and massive die-offs from drought or winter freeze-ups, making
shareholders wonder what this cursed piece of the Panhandle was good for
anyway. Bison have poor eyesight and tend to be clannish, but they are the
greatest thermo-regulators ever adapted to the plains, able to withstand
temperatures of 110 degrees in summer, and 30 below zero in winter. But
cattle are fragile. The winter of 1885–1886 nearly wiped out cattle herds in the
southern plains, and a second season of fatal cold the next year did the
same thing up north. Cowboys said they could walk the drift line, where snow
piled up along fences north of the Canadian River, for four hundred miles, into
New Mexico, and never step off a dead animal.
With the British investors pressing for a better return on their
piece of unloved and nearly uninhabited Texas, the syndicate turned to real
estate. The problem was how to sell land that only an herbivore with hooves
could love. Parts of the XIT were scenic: little pastures near a spring, red rock
and small canyons to break the ironing board of the High Plains. There was
some timber in the draws, but not enough for fuel or building material. What
fell from the sky was insufficient to grow traditional crops. And the rate of
evaporation made what rain that did fall seem like much less. It takes twenty-
two inches in the Panhandle to deposit the same moisture as fifteen inches
would leave in the Upper Mississippi Valley. The native plants that take hold,
like mesquite, send roots down as far as 150 feet.
And then there was the larger image problem.
Great American Desert. It was Stephen Long, trying to find
something of value in the treeless wilderness, who first used those words in
1820, later printed on maps that guided schooners west. It would stay as
cartographic fact until after the Civil War, when the Great American Desert
became the Great Plains. Zebulon Pike, scouting the southern half of the
Louisiana Purchase in 1806 for Thomas Jefferson, had compared it to the
African Sahara in his report to the president. Jefferson was crushed. He
feared it would take one hundred generations to settle the blank space on the
map. It was a vast empty sea, invariably described as featureless and
frightening by the Americans who traveled through it.
"A desolate waste of uninhabited solitude," wrote Robert Marcy,
after exploring the headwaters of the Red River. Marcy had the same opinion
of the region as did Long, the influential American explorer who followed Pike.
After conducting an extensive survey, Long wrote in 1820 the words that still
make him seem unusually prophetic:
"In regard to this extensive section of the country, I do not hesitate
in giving the opinion that it is almost wholly uninhabitable by a people
depending upon agriculture for their subsistence."
The answer to the syndicate's problem was aggressive
salesmanship. Why, this wasteland could be England or Missouri, if plowed
in the right way. Brochures were distributed in Europe, the American South,
and at major ports of entry to the U.S.: "500,000 acres offered for sale as
farm homes" and cheap, as well, the land selling for thirteen dollars an acre.
Twice a month, agents for the syndicate rounded up five hundred people and
put them on a train from Kansas City for the Texas Panhandle to see for
themselves. The train ride was free.
Speculators who bought from the syndicate turned around and
added to the claims. "Riches in the soil, prosperity in the air, progress
everywhere. An Empire in the making!" was a slogan of W. P. Soash, a real
estate man from Iowa who bought big pieces of the XIT and sold them
off. "Get a farm in Texas while land is cheap — where every man is a
landlord!"
To prove the agriculture-worthy potential of the Llano Estacado,
the syndicate set up experimental farms, demonstrating to immigrants how
they could make a go of it on the Texas .atlands. They worked with
government men from the Department of Agriculture. Well, sure, it rained less
than twenty inches a year, which was the accepted threshold for growing a
crop without irrigation, but through the miracle of dry farming a fellow could
turn this land to gold. Put a windmill in, and up comes water for your hogs,
chickens, and garden. And dryland wheat, it didn't need irrigation. Just plant
in the fall, when a little moisture would bring the sprouts up, let it go dormant
in the winter, and then wait for spring rains to get the crop going again.
Harvest in summer. Any three-toed fool could do it, the agents said. As for
the overturned ground, use the dust for mulch, farmers were advised; it will
hold the ground in place and keep evaporation down. That's what Hardy
Campbell, the apostle of dry farming from Lincoln, Nebraska, preached —
and the government put a stamp on his philosophy through their agriculture
office in the Panhandle. No nester was without Campbell's Soil Culture
Manual, a how-to book with homilies that all but guaranteed prosperity.
What's more, the commotion created by the act of plowing itself would bring
additional rain, causing atmospheric disturbances. Rain follows the plow?
Damn right! The Santa Fe Railroad printed an official-looking progress map,
showing the rain line — twenty inches or more, annually — moving west
about eighteen miles a year with new towns tied to the railroad. With
scientific certainty, steam from the trains was said to cause the skies to
weep.
Seasoned XIT ranch hands scoffed at such claims; the demo
projects were a scam, cowboys said. They warned anybody who would listen
that the Panhandle was no place to break the sod. Dust mulch? How was
that supposed to hold moisture in the ground, with the wind blowing steady at
thirty clicks an hour? The land was high and cold, with little drainage, and
nearly treeless in its entirety. As for rainfall, the average in the county was
about sixteen inches a year, not enough, by any traditional standards, to
sustain a crop. At Dalhart, the elevation was 4,600 feet. A blue norther would
come down from Canada through the Rockies and shake a person to their
bones. The Panhandle was good for one thing only: growing grass — God's
grass, the native carpet of plenty. Most of the land was short buffalo grass,
which, even in the driest, most wind-lacerated of years, held the ground in
place. This turf had supported the southern half of the great American bison
herd, up to thirty million animals at one point.
The best side is up, the cowboys said time and again — for
chrissakes don't plow it under. Nesters and cowboys hated each other; each
side thought the other was trying to run the other off the land. Homesteaders
were ridiculed as bonnet-wearing pilgrims, sodbusters, eyeballers,
drylanders, howlers, and religious wackos. Cowboys were hedonists on
horseback, always drunk, sex-starved. The cattle-chasers were consistent in
one way, at least. They tried telling nesters what folks at the XIT had passed
on for years, an aphorism for the High Plains:
"Miles to water, miles to wood, and only six inches to hell."
The syndicate had bondholders in London to satisfy. By 1912, the
last of the XIT cattle were off the land, and the ground that was leveraged to
build the state capitol of Texas had ceased to function as a working ranch.
Four years later, Charlie Goodnight held what he called "the last buffalo hunt"
on his ranch in Palo Duro Canyon. More than ten thousand people showed
up to watch the old cowboy chase an imported buffalo, a limp choreography.
When Bam White and his family crossed over into Texas in 1926, only
450,000 acres were unplowed of the original three-million-acre XIT.

The family spent the next night in north Dallam County, a day's ride from
Dalhart. The thunderheads had missed them, passing farther east. Bam
White rose in the winter darkness and gave his horse team another pep talk.
We're in Texas now, keep on a-going, one leg at a time. You got
us outta Colorado. You got us outta Oklahoma. Now get us through Texas to
Littlefield, and a new home.
They had crossed into one of the highest parts of the High Plains,
where the wind had its way with anything that dared poke its head out of the
ground, and it was .atter even than Oklahoma. Lizzie White wondered again
why anyone — white, brown, or red — would choose to live in this country,
the coldest part of Texas. Even the half-moon, icy at night, looked more
hospitable than this hard ground. As they said on the XIT, only barbed wire
stood between the High Plains and the North Pole.
The Whites arrived in Dalhart on February 26, 1926. Bam found a
place to camp at the edge of town and took to fretting again. Littlefield was
still 176 miles to the south. The family was down to the last of their dried
food, and they didn't know a soul. It was not the first time a family with
significant Indian blood had returned to the old treaty lands. Comanche,
Kiowa, and Apache who had drifted back lived a shadowed existence,
dressed like whites, going by names like "Indian Joe" and "Indian Gary." As
long as they stayed largely invisible, nobody paid much attention to them.
Indians were not citizens yet. They could be forcefully removed to a
reservation. Any hint of their earlier presence was gone, erased for the new
tomorrow. Dalhart had no history beyond the XIT; what came before was
viewed as having little merit.
"The northern Panhandle was settled by a group of fine pioneer
people and its citizens are of the highest type of Anglo Saxon ancestry," the
Dalhart Texan declared shortly after the Whites rolled into town.
But the new citizens of this new town were refugees, each in their
own way. Bam went to have a look around. Train whistles blew at regular
intervals. The railroads were still offering bargain fares to lure pilgrims to the
prairie, though the good land had been taken. The town looked like dice on a
brown felt table, the houses wood-framed and bare-ribbed — as tentative as a
daydream. Dalhart's first residents had planted locust trees, but most of
them did not last in the hard wind, between drought and freeze. Chinese elms
were doing a little better. The town was birthed by railroad men and was
never under the thumb of the XIT. Like the rest of the Panhandle, its frontier
was now, in the first three decades of the twentieth century. While the
northern plains were losing people disenchanted with the long winters and
ruinous cycles of drought and freeze, the southern plains were in hormonal
midadolescence. There was oil gushing and news of wildcatters making a
killing spread far and wide. The oil drew a new kind of prospector to go with
the nesters and wheat speculators tearing up the grassland. Nearly thirty
towns were born in the Panhandle between 1910 and 1930.
Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took
its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in
America was coming out of the High Plains. Up north, in Cimarron County,
Oklahoma, and Baca County, Colorado, farmers had been growing corn for
whisk brooms, but then the vacuum cleaner, in just a few years, ruined the
market for broomcorn. Prohibition saved the broomcorn farmers, making grain
more valuable as alcohol than the dried stalks had ever been for sweeping. A
single still near the Osteen family homestead up in Baca County was turning
out a barrel of corn whiskey a day, every day, nearly every year of
Prohibition. Some farmers made five hundred dollars a week. At the peak of
Prohibition, five counties in a three-state region of the High Plains shipped
fifty thousand gallons a week to distant cities.
"This is a period of fast times," a Dalhart businessman, Jim
Pigman, wrote in his diary, "and much drinking of poor liquor."
Just a few strides from the railroad switch tower, Bam White
came upon a curious sight: a two-story sanitarium. It was the only hospital
for hundreds of miles. On one side of the sanitarium was a tobacco ad — a
big, red-and-white snorting bull promoting Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco.
Inside was a specimen room, with pickled fetuses, tumors, an enlarged liver,
goiters, and a heart. The liver had belonged to a saloonkeeper in the days
before Prohibition. It was grayish green and huge, and served as a visual
aid — an example of what can happen to someone who poured too much
corn whiskey down his gullet. Presiding over the sanitarium was a tobacco-
spitting, black-bearded man of the South, Dr. George Waller Dawson. The
Doc always wore a dark Stetson, though he was said to take it off during
surgery, and kept a brass spittoon nearby for his tobacco habit. He chewed
through child delivery and lung surgery, it didn't matter. His wife, Willie
Catherine, was the finest-looking woman in the Panhandle. That wasn't just
Doc Dawson's opinion; in 1923, she won a diamond ring as prize for being
voted the most beautiful woman at a Panhandle Fourth of July celebration.
"My Willie," the Doc called the missus. She had dark eyes, an
aquiline nose, and a powerful taste for literature. Willie kept the accounting
books of the sanitarium and also served as anesthesiologist. She was the
only person who could run the solitary x-ray machine for a few hundred miles
in any direction. The Doc and his Willie were always busy cutting open
cowboys and splicing nesters back together after they had been sliced by
barbed wire, thrown from a horse, or knocked down by a windmill pump. They
patched bones, yanked gallstones, and cut away shanks of infected flesh
from people who insisted on paying them with animals, live and dead. In one
month alone, the Doc and Willie performed sixty-three operations. A
Kentuckian, Dawson had come to Texas for his health. He had persistent
respiratory problems and legs that would sometimes freeze up on him, a kind
of paralysis that puzzled the Kentucky medical community. The High Plains
was the cure. He arrived in 1907, planning to start a ranch and live off his
investments. In time, he hoped to breathe like a normal man and lavish
attention on the lovely Willie. But he lost nearly everything two years later in
a market collapse. His second chance was found in the two-story brick
building in Dalhart, well north of his ranch. He opened the sanitarium in 1912.
By the late 1920s, Dr. Dawson intended to cut back on his
medical work and try once more to make a go of it on the land. The money in
farming was so easy, just there for the taking. Despite all his years of
practicing medicine, the Doc had saved up very little for his retirement. The
nest egg would be in the land. He had purchased a couple of sections and
was going to try his luck at cotton or wheat. Wheat was supposed to be the
simplest way to bring riches from the ground. Doc Dawson would take some
time off from running the hospital and see if he could coax something from
the Staked Plains to free him of the rubbing alcohol and the pickled organs. It
was their last best chance, he told his family.
Bam White walked past the sanitarium and on down Denrock, the
main street of Dalhart. The cowboy passed the Felton Opera House, two
stories tall with fine Victorian trim, then a clothing store, with window
displays of new dress shirts and silk ties. This was Herzstein's; as far as
anyone knew, they were the only Jews in Dalhart. Streetlights, with wicks
that had to be lit every night, dangled from cords strung to poles. A bustle of
people played cards and jawboned over grain prices inside a new-looking,
yellow-brick hotel, the DeSoto. The DeSoto was first class: solid walnut
doors, a bathtub and toilet in every room, along with a telephone. A guest
could dial 126 and get a reservation to see a girl at the place just west of
Dalhart. It didn't have a name, just the Number 126 house. Next door to the
DeSoto was the moving picture establishment, the Mission Theater. None of
Bam White's children had ever seen a movie.
Crews came by with sprinklers to wet down the streets, but dust
still kicked up with every carriage and car that passed by. The town felt
somewhat tentative; a mighty breath or a twister could blow everything down,
collapsing all the pretty painted sticks. Talking to folks, Bam White found out
real quick who owned Dalhart. That would be Uncle Dick Coon, the well-fed
gentleman sitting there at the DeSoto with his cards in one hand and a hand-
rolled cigarette in the other. He owned the DeSoto, the Mission Theater, just
about every business on Denrock. You watch Uncle Dick for just a few
minutes, folks said, and you would see him flash a hundred-dollar bill from
his pocket. Three months of cowboy wages pinched between two fingers.
Bam White had never seen a hundred dollar bill till he came through Dalhart.
The C-note was Uncle Dick's heater, his blanket. As a child, Dick
Coon's family was often broke. The corrosive poverty hurt so much it defined
the rest of his life. As long as Uncle Dick could touch his C-note, he had no
fear in life. And he had certainly known fear. Dick Coon was fortunate to live
through the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the worst single natural disaster in
American history. He lost everything in Galveston but was never bitter. His
life had been spared, while six thousand people lost theirs. Dick Coon didn't
plan on getting rich in Dalhart; didn't even plan on staying in the High Plains.
In 1902, he had been passing through Dalhart, making a train connection to
Houston, when he fell under the spell of one of the syndicate's real estate
agents. He heard enough to buy his own piece of the old XIT. The ranching
went well, but the real money was in town building.
Back from his tour of town, Bam White found Lizzie in a panic and
the children looking at him like they'd just had the life scared out of them.
What is it?
Dead horse.
Again?
Dead. Check for yourself, daddy.
Bam White's horse was flat on its side, the body cold, rotted
teeth exposed. She was dead all right. Now Bam was without enough of a
team to make it another step. The family had no means to buy another
horse, and it had been hard enough traveling from Boise City to Dalhart. Well,
then, it must be a sign, Bam said to the kids — maybe he was born for this
XIT country anyhow. There have got to be plenty of jobs in this new town,
even on a gentleman's ranch.
Marooned, Bam made his decision on the spot: the family would
stay in Dalhart. A guy in town had told him about opportunities in the newly
plowed fields. This town was going places. It had a shine, a face full of
ambition. The fields were turning fast, making money for anybody with a
pulse and a plow. The way White looked at Dalhart was the way Doc Dawson
and Uncle Dick looked at their homes in the Panhandle: as the last best
chance to do something right, to get a small piece of the world and make it
work. The wanderer would settle in and see what the earth would bring him in
what had been the world's greatest grassland.

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I read every line !

This was a great historical book on the cause and effect of the Dust Bowl at the early 1900's. How millions of acres of grassland were destroyed and the effect on families and the nation, -about a time in our country we all hear about occasionally but rarely hear the why and how of it and how it devastated people. It was written so well i read every line.

As I read it - it could have been our times today. Banks closing down, people not aware of the consequences of what they were doing, poor government policies, the drive for more and more, the devastation to our ecological system,

The writer also reminds us we aren't done messing around - we are drawing down the biggest reserve we have - the Ogallala Aquifer - at a tremendous rate - this serves 30% of the irrigation water in the US. The cotton farmers in Texas are siphoning from the aquifer so they can dramatically increase their production of cotton, which no longer has an American market So these the cotton growers get three billion dollars a year in tax payer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing that is sold back to American retail stores like Wal-Mart. At the current rate of water consumption the aquifer will dry up within 100 years, and in some parts of the US before then. As the writer says - we were founded as a nation of settlers and farmers and less than 1% of all jobs are in agriculture now.

It is a great book to remind us to pay attention to what is happening today before we lose something we can't replace.

21 out of 23 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted January 27, 2006

Your map is wrong.

First, Follett and Darrouzett, Texas need to be reversed on your map of the 'Dust Bowl'. Second, 'No Man's Land' includes the entire Oklahoma Panhandle, not just the western portion as your book states. These oversights are just two of the many that plague Timothy Egan's new book, 'The Worst Hard Time'. The hyper, sensationalized, erratic, journalistic style of writing does not pay tribute to the historical subject matter at hand, as his title and thesis would suggest, but instead turns on 'those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl' and portrayes them as ignorant sheep, rapers of a fragile land and thieves, taking from those to whom Egan belives it clearly belongs, the Plains Indian. Egan writes that 'those who had broken the prarie grass, only to have it break them' were now left with only three ways to get food during the worst hard time. Soup lines in Boise City, roadkill or stealing. Soup lines in a town nearly void of humankind? Roadkill in a country void of vehicles? Stealing in a country where no one has anything to steal? Egan and those who herald this book should be ashamed of themselves. Egan clearly shows contempt for his subject and subject matter through out the pages of his book.

15 out of 34 people found this review helpful.

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waynedale

Posted May 31, 2009

Terrific

I am familiar with this area in the Oklahoma panhandle. I have family there. It is amazing to think that anyone then or now would try to live in that region.

This book gives a vivid account of the trials and tribulations facing the people of that tough enviroment.

It also examines the folly of pursuing short term gain without trying to anticipate the long term effects of their planting efforts during those times.

13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted August 6, 2008

An engrossing, educational book.

My mother lived through the Dust Bowl as a young girl. She never spoke about it except to say it was very dusty. Well, hearing that I thought that was all there was to it. What an education I received about my mother's childhood. As I progressed through the book I would ask her questions and I found she lived what I was reading! Black Sunday is still a vivid memory for her. I highly recommend this book for anyone, especially those that may know someone that experienced the Dust Bowl first hand. An important piece of American history.

12 out of 12 people found this review helpful.

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RivkahOH

Posted March 30, 2009

Fascinating, frightening and oddly inspirational

Timothy Egan does an excellent job of presenting the horrors of the Dust Bowl years in very human terms. For those of us who have been taught to think of the Great Depression in terms of bankers and stockbrokers jumping off ledges, and to visualize only the urban poor of the Thirties, this offers some insight into what was happening in the rest of the country. The people Egan focuses on, unlike the Okies of The Grapes of Wrath, chose to stay in their homes despite seeing their world destroyed or simply blown away. The Worst Hard Time serves as a history of the Dust Bowl, a story of human endurance, and a cautionary tale of how we use and abuse the land.

10 out of 12 people found this review helpful.

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MayDefarge

Posted January 19, 2010

I Also Recommend:

The Destruction of Our Western Plains

This book is subtitled "The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl," and the author has given us an up-close and personal look into the lives of real Americans who did not flee from Oklahoma and the other states affected by the Dust Bowl events. This is the story of several families in towns of the Great Plains who clung to the land they had helped to ruin even through the Great Depression. This is our parents' and grandparents' generation whose stories are preserved for us by author Timothy Egan in the hope that this man-made disaster will never happen again in our country. It is the history of an event caused by man's abuse of his natural environment.
John Steinbeck wrote in Grapes of Wrath about the "Okies" who fled the Dust Bowl and the tragedy of their lives. Egan writes of those who stayed, hidden behind windows covered with wet sheets to keep out the dust;who watched while their animals died outside from starvation caused by internal suffocation; who watched while their crops and gardens were destroyed and covered with dust; and who suffered while their babies and children died from "dust pneumonia." He tells us of the starvation of families who lived in sod houses on the prairie and the eventual disappearance of entire communities. He points out the political charlatans and greedy land-grabbers who rode the wave of western settlement when there was prosperity.
Because this is American history, the story has to be told that our government and the people who followed a dream to the Great Plains were the cause of this great disaster. Ignorance of environmental conditions and total unconcern for the results of the tearing up of the prairie brought desolation to the land and despair to the inhabitants.
There are descriptions of the dust storms that stretch the imagination. On Jan. 21, 1932, a cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared just outside Amarillo, Texas. The winds were clocked at more than 60 miles per hour. This black mountain of dust was a blizzard that caused the sky to go dark in the middle of the day and created zero visibility. These blizzards blew for 7 days without stopping and covered parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas. Because dust is made up of sand particles (silicon), it is as sharp as glass and deadly to those who inhale it. Eventually the dust blew east into Chicago, New York, Washington, and onto ships in the Atlantic Ocean. There are some amazing pictures in the book that a few journalists and others were able to capture during this period.
A fascinating part of this story is the politics in Washington during this time and the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt to save the people of the Great Plains and to reclaim the land before it became desert. Just as his 6th cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, had worked to save the western forests, Franklin Roosevelt found himself working to save the western plains.
Whenever I read the stories that people recall of their past, I stop and wonder if we really listen to what they are trying to tell us. Have we learned anything from this terrible tragedy, or will we allow those who only care about profit to destroy our natural resources?

7 out of 9 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted February 16, 2009

Incredibly Educational

The Worst Hard Time is an amazing book with great detail and vivid descriptions of the Dust Bowl. I have read volumes of historical books and believe this one to be among the best.

6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted July 24, 2008

Had to stop reading to go to work...ARGH!

I found this book very interesting and in some respects topical to today's environmental and finanacial events. Being a Baby Boomer I heard all the depression stories from my grandparents. My husband's grand-parents left the Dust Bowl of OK early on, but reading this book you can appreciate why people held on. While the first reviewer totally bashed the book I really believe you do get a feel for what the people were living through and I didn't get where the book blamed the people, but in fact it made me realize how deceived they were by the number of factors presented in the book. If you love history I do think you'll enjoy the book as it's a subject that is just brushed by in history classes, which is the reason I picked it up to read.

6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted May 22, 2008

A reviewer

I love history and knew (very little) about the dust bowl era. This book seemed like a good choice. By the end of the book I was near tears as the epiloge wound down the stories of people I had come to know very intimatly in the previou 300 pages. Absolutly amazing is how I would rate this book. A must read for people who would like to know more about what made this country what it is.

6 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted January 17, 2008

Stunning...

This book is excellent. Egan deftly shatters many of the stereotypes associated with the 'dust bowl' and the people who survived it. He focuses not on the families who fled, but on the stout souls who chose to stick it out whether out of a sense of dedication, foolishness or from a lack of real options. Our modern 'disasters' pale in comparison to the grinding, seemingly ceaseless agony that was the dust bowl and the Great Depression. Egan has produced something truly meaningful and valuable in this book.

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted June 25, 2008

Finally done with it...

I really had high hopes for this one after reading all of the great reviews. After all, it won a national book award, right? Well... I've just mercifully finished it and found it to be a little too dry and slow. I'm usually a lover of historical period books like these, but I thought this one was disappointing. I enjoyed reading about the effects of the dust at first, but just felt I kept reading about the same thing chapter after chapter. There never really seemed to be a pace to the book until the final 80 or so pages.

3 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted March 15, 2012

Amazing

I knew about The Dust Bowl from my gradeschool history lesson. I NEVER realized it lasted 10Years!!! I also never realized that the dust reached Washhington DC on what is called Black Sunday. This is a great read if you enjoy reading about history that didn't make it into our traditional history books.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted November 9, 2011

Good local history

I enjoyed reading this book (although, pardon the pun, at times it was a bit dry). Being a native of Colorado, and being able to read about something that happened so close to home, really drew me into this book. I love to learn about natural diasters, and this was a bit eye opening to discover that the "dusters" were not just one or two years of irritation, but tormented the people and their lives for much, much longer than I thought. Dust pneumonia? Static electricity from dust clouds? Who knew? I can't even imagine what it was like to try to survive in such a horrible environment. It was creepy to look at the pictures and imagine myself in the shoes of someone looking into the approaching cloud of debris, and the devastation in some places even to this day is depressing. I do wish the grasshopper plague had been covered a bit more, but all in all, this was an excellent read.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted December 19, 2012

Copycat

*he bashes the bot's head in*

1 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

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Jbarn

Posted August 24, 2009

An excellent historical perspective.

Mr. Egan weaves an outstanding portrait of the impact of the late 20's/early 30's financial and ecological crises on individuals and families of the Dust Bowl. Mr. Egan provides the reader with the emotional and physical trauma associated with the period by setting the political and economic context and following individuals through their personal challenges. The description of the FDR Administration's New Deal put into perspective current responses to today's Great Recession. A fascinating book with a readily accessible writing style. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Excellent read

This book is a riveting read. It shows the toughness of the American people. Even mirrors what is happening today. I recommend it to anyone interested in current American history.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted December 20, 2008

Eye Opening to My Own Family's History

I found this book very inspiring. Also it had a message about today's environmental and finanacial events which I find very frightening! I enjoyed the verbal history researched by the writer in Notes and Sources in the back of the book. My family lived in Amarillo and Littlefield. My grandmother died from dust pneumonia on her farm which was part of the original XIT Ranch. My mother-in-law was a school teacher in a one room school house in the Oklahoma Panhandle. She told me she had to shovel dirt out of the school each morning. All of these family members are dead now so I can't ask more questions. I knew about the Dust Bowl but not as much as I thought. This should be a must read in American History in school! A wonderfully told factual story!

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted October 23, 2008

The map IS CORRECT.

To the first poster that said the map was wrong - you need to get a map of Texas and you will find you are wrong!! Most likely you are wrong about every thing else. I am reading the book right now and find it fascinating. I knew about the dust bowl but never knewr the extent of the devastation. I guess it was just "something that happened in Grandma's time". It has now become a real thing to me; something I can imagine, see, almost feel.<BR/><BR/>It's funny that that poster was the only one to trash the book. Hmmmm...

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Anonymous

Posted December 14, 2006

A must read for baby boomers

I would think that I had heard, and read, of it all. Until I read this book, I was unaware of the wide reaching effects, as a person born in the 60's, of the dust bowl. Everyone who is feeling they are deprived because they didn't get their Lexus or PS3 for Christmas should right their perspective through this book of suffering, loyalty, and steadfast determination to beat the odds. And please remember that there are millions of people in third world nations who would love to be in your shoes, right now.

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Anonymous

Posted November 18, 2006

Heartbreaking

As a Texas Panhandle native, I can recall my grandfather's scathing comments about those who had foolishly eroded the treasure of soil in what used to be called 'The Golden Spread.' This book effectively tells the story of a horrid, unforgiving phenomenon that we in this area hope is never repeated. It is well-written and accurate in its analysis.

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